Fibre Optic Cabling v Copper Data Cabling

Fibre Optic Cabling Or Copper Data Cabling – Which Should You Choose ?

Fibre Optic v Copper Data Cabling.

Structured cabling offers a whole system of cables along with connectors and related hardware for voice and data cabling. It is applicable for enterprise data network as well as office fit out cabling. Your preference for IT cabling material can directly affect the productivity of your IT arrangement, the trouble-free and fast transfer of data across the network, the power consumption, and the overall impact on the environment. Usually, enterprise IT networks consider copper data cabling, mostly from the Cat 5e and Cat 6 specifications for data cabling.

Copper Cabling

Copper cable is suitable as a short-range cable (less than 100m) that runs to support typical desktop applications, however, for a higher throughput of data, faster transmission speeds and bandwidth demands of recent intensive commercial application and telecommunications set the limit on cabling to approximate 10 GB/s. For instance, integration of AV cabling with an established IT cabling by use of Internet Protocol (IP). The advancement in IT cabling technology has resulted in wider adoption of the 10G cabling, which empowered the data transfer speed to reach 10 GB/s over Ethernet networks.

In addition to that, the length of cable and higher speed of data transfer needed for the most advanced business system led to introduction of Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI), even in 10gig Cabling. The installation of 10G cabling is comparatively complicated and demand for high skills and expertise.

Fibre Optic Cabling

Fibre optic cabling contains very thin fibres of plastic or glass, which are called optical fibres. Every strand is capable of carrying approximately 25,000 calls, which means that an office fit out cabling based on fibre optics has the capacity to field up millions of calls. The network bandwidth and speed of data transmission is also substantially higher through fibre optic cabling as compared to copper cabling. A broadband based on optical fibre can normally provide the speed which is five to ten times faster as compared to traditional DSL broadband.

Fibre optic cabling also consumes less space, is less heavy, and has a higher density, and fibre splicing allows it to be laid in much longer runs. Expert organisations are preferring fibre optic cabling for increasing number of process and data-intensive applications. This includes Unified Communications (UC), and access to cloud-based and cloud hosted services.